Task 5 Blogs

Blogs


Safety

Personal Information

Electronic communications are quick and easy but they also have real world dangers. Unlike writing down information on paper, personal records on computer based systems can be easily transferred, stolen or misused by a hacker. You need to remember to be careful with your personal information as other people can impersonate to be someone else on the internet. Hackers, criminals and other unpleasant people can go online and search the internet and take advantage of naïve people. Criminals go to social sites to try and collect information on passwords. For example, many people uses their mothers name or pets name as their password and criminals can use this by looking their profile page

Uploading and viewing digital content

When you upload your own digital content like videos and images to the internet it will be seen all over the whole world to see and not just to the people you know. So you might want to think twice of what exactly what upload online because let’s say you upload something on Facebook and employers might see it and question your character.

Respect towards others

It is very important that you should be giving your colleges the full respect that they deserve. This is especially important when it comes to social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Negative and offensive comments can be seen by a large number of people then you think. If you send generally negative comments towards your fellow workers, it will portray you in a bad light.

Data Protection Regulations

Data Protection Act

In the UK personal information about living individuals is protected by the Data Protection Act (1998) this law requires any company that keeps personal information about people on its computer, to take account with the Data Protection Register and to keep the eight Data Protection Principles. These principles are:

• Data may only be used for the reason it was collected.
• Data can’t be passed onto other people without the knowledge of the person who is based
• People have a right to access the information that details them.
• Any personal information may be kept for as long as it is necessary and must be kept up to date
• Any information must not be sent out of Europe unless the person the data is about has agreed.
• All organisations that process personal information must register with the Information Commissions Office.
• Organisations that have personal information are required to have satisfactory security measures in place.
• People have a right to have their information to be corrected if there are any faults within it.

Encryption

This is a method of encoding data so that the intended user can decode it. For example, you can translate data on the hard drive on your computer so that if it is stolen the data cannot be read.

You can also use encryption on the internet when using a wireless link. This is important if you are ever sending information that is strictly secret or confidential, like passwords, security info or bank details as it is a possibility for someone to hack into the wireless communication and misuse any information they find.

Firewalls

Firewalls is software that examines all data and information that your computer, PC, laptop or network has had or gained from the internet. The firewall will terminate anything that it finds to be dangerous to the safety of the computer. Firewall is a very useful tool of keeping your network safe by making sure that no viruses will enter and can prevent hackers from gaining access to any systems.